


reflections of broken shards

by kiafeles, pondlilies



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Friendship, Gen, Manga Spoilers, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-08-20 20:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20233828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiafeles/pseuds/kiafeles, https://archiveofourown.org/users/pondlilies/pseuds/pondlilies
Summary: When Natsume disappears, his friends and family discover the power in forging new connections.





	reflections of broken shards

**Author's Note:**

> lily: This was my first Big Bang so I was a bit nervous at first but Kiana was really fun to work with and I really liked how everything turned out, I hope everyone likes it too! I have my tumblr listed, it is an art blog. Feel free to check it out but just know I don't usually post natsume yuujinchou art  
[lily's tumblr](https://pondlilies00.tumblr.com)  
[an additional link to lily's art for the fic!](https://imgur.com/Imlwc0x)
> 
> kiana: Hello! This was also my first Big Bang and I'm happy to have participated! Lily was lovely, and I'm glad we were able to collab for this project! Hope you enjoy!  
[kiana's twitter](https://twitter.com/kiafeles)

_May 15 - 16_

Takashi has disappeared before, and everything turned out fine.

Touko wouldn’t hasten to call it a pattern, but Takashi has been prone to strange absences and odd behavior in the past. Occasionally he comes back tousled up and ill, or quiet and suspiciously demure, but he always comes back.

He’s disappeared before overnight as well, or run off when he thinks that she isn’t aware. She hardly sleeps those nights, but experience has taught her patience. More often than not she catches him before he sets out, and each time sends a burst of anxiety thrumming through her until she sees him the next day, proud in some tired and mysterious way.

Takashi is a strange child, but an honest one. In every lie of his is a glimmer of truth, called forward by the genuine nature of his kindness. She’s grateful for the time she spends with him, even if she doesn’t understand every moment. She suspects that a good deal flies over her head, but it doesn’t usually send her into such a tizzy.

Still, when he doesn’t appear after school one day, she feels the sharpening edges of worry. By now he has grown accustomed to spending time with friends or in the woods in his off time, so she won’t often see him until dinner, unless they decided earlier to spend the afternoon together gardening or doing chores.

She expects him back late this night, or at the very least to call the house. When he ran off before, he did that. She hopes desperately that he will do it again.

Shigeru tells her not to fret. Takashi is resourceful and intelligent, even if he has his forgetful or cagey moments.

Nishimura and Kitamoto come by the next morning, seeing as they don’t have school. The students ask about Takashi, tells her how he promised to go fishing with him that morning. She says he didn’t come home that night, and their twin looks of astonishment and concern imprint into her memory.

Tanuma and Taki are equally as worried, and it is their worry that finally twists Shigeru’s expression into something less amused, something more apprehensive. They know how close Takashi has grown to his friends, so to see them as struck with confusion as her sets the final alarm bells ringing in her head.

Takashi is missing. The boy she considers a son, the sweet, kind presence she has come to welcome and expect in her home, is gone. No sign of him, no trace except the few who say they witnessed him leaving school that day. Apart from that, nothing.

That night, she sees Nyankichi, staring out the window of Takashi’s otherwise unoccupied room.

She steps into the room, taking it all in. At first, Takashi refused to personalize the space, keeping most of his belongings in the closet or in a box. She assumes he must be used to suddenly picking up and leaving, and as much as she wishes for him to think otherwise with her, she knows how difficult such habits are to break.

The round cat turns at her and meows once, a long and mournful sort of sound, before he turns to jump out the window.

Touko knows that there are things she doesn’t perceive in this world, and interactions she cannot understand, but she thinks she can understand the cat then.

Later that night, Nyankichi returns and sits with her on her bed until she falls asleep. She thanks him for the comfort as she pets the strange fur of his soft head. He’s always been Takashi’s most loyal confidant, after all.

_May 19_

Natori doesn’t hear about it at first, too lost in the grind of his day to day life to catch all of the signs, the absences that Natsume has slowly come to fill in his schedule.

He decides to drop by to see the boy, which is how it first comes to his attention. An exorcist family formally involved in the business claimed to have been approached by some youkai spreading bad luck and sickness. Jumping from contact to contact brought the case to Natori, who snatched it up as soon as he realized the case’s proximity to the Fujiwara residence.

He forms a day plan. He can deal with the pesky youkai, then stop by and say hello to the boy and his family afterwards. The plan so thoroughly sneaks its way into Natori’s subconscious that he nearly misses the paper sign, damning and prominent as it is.

Clinging to a telephone poll with small, translucent adhesive is a poster. It looks handmade, simplistic in design but carefully constructed all the same. Upon closer inspection, Natori identifies it as a missing person’s poster. The words pop off the page, dark and desperate, beside the picture of a young boy.

Hiiragi pops into existence beside him. His realization comes just as quickly into the light.

She takes a moment longer to register it, her mask exposing none of the emotions she must be feeling, before she just as easily disappears. He would feel an emptiness in him, abandonment at being left to process this by himself, if he didn’t know exactly where she is going.

He sets off in a sprint to the Fujiwara home. His mind seems trapped behind him, floating restlessly in that moment in front of that poster, and he lets it spiral. Five minutes. He’ll give himself five minutes to feel the panic, to feel the restlessness and disbelief, before his mind catches up to him.

He needs to speak to Touko. She would know what happened to Natsume.

He expects to find her at home, fretting over the boy. He feels careless. The poster threw him into such disarray that he didn’t even read the date of disappearance. Letting the cool calm he’s come to rely on slither onto his features, he steadies his pace and prepares.

“Natori,” comes Hiiragi’s voice from beside him. Only years of practice keeps him from flinching. “They’re not at home. Follow me.”

He sets off in the new direction, and before long he sees them. Touko, her hair ruffled, holds one of the posters out to a stranger. Behind her are Natsume’s friends. Tanuma and Taki, he recalls belatedly. Brave children, but equally as reckless as their friend.

Their expressions tug at a latent sense of familiarity. Natori remembers once, in his final year of high school, hearing about a young exorcist who disappeared suddenly and without warning. At that age he didn’t think much of it. The job is dangerous, and accidents are not uncommon.

The story seems much worse in retrospect, if only because he remembers hearing about it from the exorcist’s shiki, the ones closest to the disappearing man. He held little sympathy for them back then, but it grows in the newfound light of the present, watching these desperate teenagers.

Touko speaks to the stranger, who shakes their head and continues about their day, perhaps a little disturbed but otherwise unimpeded. Natori sees the specter of his teenage self in their hurried steps down the road.

It’s so easy to detach yourself emotionally from a situation when you only hear about it from a distance, he thinks.

Taki spots him a moment later. She sends a hesitant wave his direction, and he pads over.

They tell him where Natsume was last seen, who he last spoke to. Each detail sends nausea churning into Natori’s belly, but he swallows it with a reassuring smile. Natsume should be all right, and they’ll find him.

Before she leaves, Touko hands him a stack of the missing papers, and the weight feels far more than physical. He promises that he’ll pass them around, make use of his time in town to the best of his abilities. He’ll meet up with them again later.

Once they leave, he looks at the screen of his cell phone. Despite the bad blood, he never deleted this particular number. He usually rationalizes it by saying it’s just for business. Who wouldn’t want the Matoba clan in their phone contacts, if only as a warning not to pick up the phone?

With only a fraction of a second of hesitancy, he sends the call. Pulling the phone up to his ear, he waits. Matoba picks up after the third ring, as if the first was spent in shock, the second in indecision, and the third in smug satisfaction. Natori images it to pass that way, at least.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you,” says Matoba.

“This isn’t a friendly call,” Natori says. He hates to show vulnerability, and instead hardens his voice and his heart. “Have you seen Natsume recently?”

“I can’t say that I have.” The voice on the other side of the line is tinny, but curious as well.

“He’s been missing for a few days. His guardians are worried.” As much as Matoba has come to irritate him over the years, he doesn’t think the man himself would detain a teenager for so long as to cause this situation. Perhaps a day, at most. Still, shady actions attract even shadier characters, so the accusatory tone is not completely unwarranted. Someone in the clan, or an exorcists connected to it, might know what happened if it involved the youkai world, as Natori suspects. And if that is not the case, then the Matoba clan is the primary resource for looking into the issue, as much as it pains Natori to admit it. Such is the power of a large and prosperous group.

“Missing?” Matoba hums. He sounds at most contemplative. “Perhaps a youkai has gotten to him. He’s not exactly careful around them.”

Natori grits his teeth. It seems the most likely conclusion considering Natsume’s history, but it wouldn’t do any good to jump the gun so early. As terrible and likely as it is for Natsume to be harmed by that which Matoba and Natori have so frequently warned him against, it seems almost more terrible to consider some other factor, human or otherwise, could be at fault. And yet they cannot afford to rule that out just yet.

“If he has, I want you to find out.”

“I’ll leave no rock unturned.” A pause. The hesitancy seems almost out of character, and the nonchalance that follows equally as suspicious. “And you?”

Natori glances at Hiiragi. Her shoulders are tense. Just a few years ago, he wouldn’t have read any further into that language, if he would have noticed it at all. He supposes he has Natsume to thank in being able to read his shiki now, to know she must feel as on edge as Natori himself does.

“I’m going to speak to the Fujiwaras more. This absence is abnormal, even for him.”

“Keep me updated,” Matoba says, before hanging up.

Natori grips his phone tightly in his palm.

“I’m going to go speak with the local youkai,” Hiiragi says. He doesn’t suspect she is asking permission. He wouldn’t expect her to be.

Still, he nods at her to confirm, watching as she flies off before him. He should probably follow her later, to cover on foot the local paths he’s seen Natsume frequent before.

Before he goes, he calls up his agent. Tells her that he’ll be booked indefinitely, that he’ll finish his most recent job and stop after that. She’s confused but aware of the toll that his exorcist job sometimes takes, so all she does is tell him to call her back as soon as he’s ready to work out the details.

Perhaps that’s all that she thinks that this is, a slightly extended foray back into the world of youkai. Natori hopes that she will be right.

_May 21_

It hasn’t even been a week yet, but even that seems too long. Tanuma hasn’t really ever considered a week to be long before. He’d hardly consider himself a social butterfly, but with school, spending time with friends, or helping out his father at the temple, a week hardly seems like the length of a blink.

And yet this week seems longer than the average. Painfully so. It’s harder when he’s watching the hours go by, achingly anticipating anything to be a sign: a call, a knock at the door, something to show him that the waiting will be worth it.

He misses Natsume, and fears for him too. While Natsume has opened up recently, shares more with every breath than he ever did early in their relationship, he still hides things he thinks Tanuma shouldn’t know. Even when Tanuma himself insists he can help, limited as that help may be, there are still moments when Natsume refuses to ask for it.

Tanuma knows enough of the danger Natsume has become accustomed with to guess why. He suspects that some of that danger may have led to their current predicament, and even more than usual, he feels his own uselessness to fix it.

It hasn’t even been a week yet, but Tanuma is done waiting. He’s not allowed to work with the police or the normal search parties, and with every day that passes, the likelihood of these methods being fruitful diminishes.

Tanuma refuses to believe that Natsume has passed, somewhere deep in the woods. And so he suspects he’ll need to approach this with the very methods Natsume warmed him against.

Tanuma knows that Natori is in town, or at least that he was recently. After debriefing the older man of the situation, he knew what conclusion an exorcist might come to.

He comes up with an idea, or more accurately, a desire. He considers telling Taki about it, but decides against it. Her magic circles would be more than beneficial in finding whatever youkai might have harmed Natsume. And yet if he chooses to approach Natori so brazenly, he doesn’t want to put her at risk. Natsume has told Tanuma at length about the dangers of Taki’s grandfather’s work, of its illegitimate status in the exorcist world. He wouldn’t want her to get in trouble in an already tough time, simply because she wants to help, when he has Natori and Ponta with youkai sight already.

That nagging irritation, that his abilities are incapable of catching up when they are needed, plagues him. Still, he goes.

With Ponta in his arms, he approaches Natori at a small café in town. Natori looks beaten down in the booth, all of the sparkle of his actor persona discarded in place of exhaustion.

Ponta shifts in Tanuma’s embrace, head tilted to the space beside Natori, and then across from him. Tanuma squeezes the cat in thanks. Now he knows where the shiki are, and can sit accordingly so as not to take up their space by accident.

He sits, and Natori gives him a smile. Some of the sparkle returns, although the reassurance is dim.

“Any news?” Tanuma asks, before Natori can get a word in edgewise.

Natori shakes his head. “We’ve been searching everywhere. Looking up leads. I’ve called in every favor I have at this point and…nothing.”

Tanuma expects the answer, but it still sounds terrible when put into words. Yet he doesn’t feel any anger toward Natori, because how could he? Despite how strange the older man acts, Tanuma can sense how much he cares about Natsume. Natsume seems to attract people like that to him.

Tanuma wonders what may have brought him and Natsume together in the first place. Was it luck, moving here and attending Natsume’s school? Or something else? Tanuma hopes that one day he’ll have the opportunity to ask.

“I want to help more,” Tanuma says aloud. “You know a lot about youkai. About what they can do, and how to deal with them.” His lips feel heavy, his throat clogged, but he keeps going. “I can’t normally see youkai. At the most, all I can do is sense them. That’s not very useful by itself, but I know that there’s more than just that to dealing with youkai.”

Natori stares at him.

“I want to—“

“Absolutely not.” Natori holds up a hand, and Tanuma clamps his mouth shut. “I’m not going to teach you exorcism for this. Don’t ask.”

The denial is sharp, far more than Tanuma expects. Still, he pushes forward.

“If you don’t, I’ll just go out and keep looking by myself.” He hugs Ponta closer. “Or with Ponta.”

Tanuma feels a little dirty, putting it like that, but stands his ground regardless.

“No, you won’t. At the moment, it’s too dangerous to meddle.” If something threatening took out Natsume, who by all means is the most powerful person spiritually that either of them have met, then it’s enough of a task for Natori to deal with, let alone powerless Tanuma. Tanuma knows this, but he does not relent.

They stare each other down across the table, and it’s only the presence of a waiter, asking Natori if he wants more coffee, that breaks the spell.

Natori shifts his gaze to Ponta. It would make Tanuma laugh in any other situation, for Natori to defer to the only other ‘adult’ in the room.

“And you’re okay with this?”

Ponta growls. “I’m not a fan of you, but even I can’t figure out what happened. Some organization between us could be beneficial.”

Both of Natori’s hands come up to his face, rubbing down and then back up through his hair. Sighing, he pulls his glasses out of his front pocket and puts them on, pushing them back with two fingers.

“Fine. You can tag along. Urihime.” He speaks to the empty air. Tanuma does his best to look at where he thinks the shiki’s eyes must be. “Stick to him. Make sure he doesn’t ever get lost.”

Tanuma feels the barest brush of air against the back of his neck, but he doesn’t flinch.

Natori throws down some change and stands up. “Let’s go,” he says. Tanuma readily follows.

_June 24 - ///_

Natori ends up being a better mentor than Tanuma initially expected him to be.

He’s not the most patient man in existence, but he certainly puts up the façade that he is. On trips into the forest, where Natori and his shiki scour the land for any signs, Tanuma follows him asking questions, often with Ponta at his back. The cat monster occasionally explains to Tanuma what everyone else is easily seeing, but more often than not he remains silent, or elects to leave the exorcist pack alone entirely, in favor of spreading out with the Dog’s Circle for a wider reach.

He even meets Natori’s agent. The older woman nearly begs for Natori to consider some roles she has lined up, but Natori refuses every one. He spends most of his time doing odd exorcist jobs, looking for Natsume, mentoring Tanuma, or overlapping those tasks. Tanuma spends time at school, or with Taki and his classmates. The time with the other students is tinged with a ringing sense of wrongness, and even the spirited Nishimura has developed a melancholy temperament, so their outings have grown fewer and farther between. Any extra hours in the day are spent with Natori.

During these times, Natori explains every step of what he is doing. He shows Tanuma the paper dolls, his family specialty, as well as the other kinds of dolls that can be made, with which kinds of papers, and which kinds of inscriptions. There are pots that can be used to capture or locate youkai, circles to be drawn, chants and spells and rituals that can increase their chances. Tanuma soaks it up readily.

“If you’re going to learn,” Natori says, after Tanuma finally constructs a functional doll, flitting a few feet into the air before it plummets back to earth, “then you’re going to learn correctly. Not like I did.” The man laughs at this comment. Tanuma knows Natori began practicing around the age that Tanuma is now, but other than that only has a vague sense that something troubling happened.

For all the obscurity in the personal department, though, Natori spares no detail in the technical. Tanuma learns, and with everything he learns, he puts it as practically as he can towards finding his best friend.

“I’m teaching you this so you can protect yourself,” Natori reaffirms. “Not so you can make it some sort of career.” Tanuma nods obligingly.

One day, Natori takes him to meet a man named Takuma. Tanuma learns that he helped Natori during his teenage years, doing much the same that Natori is doing for Tanuma now. The older man takes on an almost nostalgic expression looking at Tanuma, and while Natori and Takuma talk in hushed voices in the older man’s office, a few rooms over, Tanuma sits across from the man’s daughter, Tsukiko.

“He used to be able to see, you know. I’ve never been able to, but he did. His shiki still watches the house,” she explains to him.

“Even though they can’t speak to each other?” Tanuma says. It sounds like a terribly lonely experience, wanting so hard to reach someone and being incapable of doing so.

A terribly lonely, familiar experience.

“It’s unfortunate, but it’s all they can do.” She shrugs, face downturned. “Sometimes I feel guilty about it. ‘If I’d been born with the ability, maybe I could do more,’ and so on,” she says. She pushes a hand forward and pats Tanuma’s shoulder reassuringly. Her hand is warm.

“I miss Natsume, too, but I think he would know that you’re doing your best,” she adds. Tanuma’s tea suddenly grows salty, but he thanks her for it all the same.

Over time, Tanuma grows better with the dolls. They can float freely now, and don’t easily break up in stronger winds. Natori occasionally takes him to especially spiritual areas, hidden behind shrines or in dark and abandoned abodes like the Omibashira mansion, where even Tanuma can see the youkai with ease. He practices casting the dolls, sending them out after the little youkai which scamper through small bushes or after Natori himself. With every exercise, Tanuma feels more and more confident in himself. He thinks this sense of satisfaction may simply be disguising the deeper longing and grief in his mind, but he tries not to dwell on that.

Misuzu even reappears, one day, in his human form. Natori grows suddenly skittish the moment he registers that the strange, pretty man before them is in fact a youkai, and a large and imposing one at that, but Tanuma practices with him, too. Behind the slightly smug upturn of the spirit’s mouth and the jabs at Tanuma’s increasingly exorcist leaning, Tanuma can tell that the youkai seems equally as puzzled as the humans, and equally as determined to solve their case once and for all.

Not long after first meeting with Takuma and Tsukiko, Natori hands Tanuma something small and wrapped in fabric. He peels it open like a fruit to find a pair of glasses inside, the same model as Natori’s. Holding them up to the light shows that they are not prescription, but instead simple glass.

“They help you see better,” he explains. Tanuma puts them on without delay. He doesn’t think he can see any more than normally, but the weight of the frame on his nose and behind his ears serve as a sign that he has done something, that he’s working forward to what he so desperately wants to see.

Hiiragi takes every opportunity she has to speak to Tanuma, when Tanuma is aware that she is there. She’s never loquacious, but she does say that the glasses make him look older and more mature, like an accountant. Hidden behind her mask and dry delivery, he can’t tell if she is joking or not, but he laughs anyway. It feels like relief.

_July 7_

Matoba’s clan has found nothing of the missing boy.

Getting a call from Natori out of the blue after so long had certainly been a shock, but a welcome one nonetheless, even if the reason for it in the first place was less than optimal. So he did as Natori requested. His artificial shiki began to search through the mountainsides and out from his multiple estates, and with time they found nothing.

After a few weeks, and they still haven’t found the boy? His initial assessment, of Natsume growing unlucky and angering the wrong youkai, seems more and more likely. Matoba has his suspicions that Natsume is one of the strongest spiritually empowered persons he knows. It must be, the way he attracts youkai to him without so much as a contract or formal agreement. To think that so talented and willful a child may have fallen to his own hubris caters to Matoba’s understanding of the world, but it rings hollowly all the same. He can’t precisely pinpoint why.

The whole shitstorm of a situation manages to rattle Nanase, which is an incredible feat in and of itself. She hears about the situation directly from Matoba immediately after he first receives Natori’s call, but with Natori’s continued prodding into his contacts in the exorcist world, they begin to hear it from external sources as well. Not too many, as Matoba suspects Natori doesn’t want to start a wild goose chase around the whole fiasco, lest some particularly volatile exorcists begin a scorched-earth policy with the disappearance as justification, but the issue does become a hot topic among a few of their mutual contacts.

Nanase’s face remains stoic with each empty report from their shiki, but Matoba has grown up with her. He knows what she must be thinking, as he thinks it himself: if this is the work of a youkai, it must be a powerful one or a lucky one, to fell so strong a child.

Yet with each passing day, an emotion settles in his gut like miasma. Does he feel grief? Regret? No, or at least, he shouldn’t. He offered to teach Natsume the ways of his clan multiple times, and was rejected every time. Initially it was a power grab, but perhaps if Natsume had said yes, he wouldn’t have found himself in such a situation.

It should not feel so complicated.

Matoba dismisses this train of thought. For all intents and purposes, it has been long enough to suspect that nothing good will come from contemplating a future with Natsume in it.

With this clouding his mind, he takes on a case alone, bow in hand, which upon deeper thought one of his subordinates could have easily taken. It is hardly worth his time—a low level spirit wailing loudly and obnoxiously from a shrine—but it’s close to where he knows Natsume’s guardians live that he thinks perhaps the decision was subconscious.

Maybe he should tell them about his suspicions, he thinks idly. The police certainly won’t find any leads if he's right. It might set the Fujiwaras' minds to rest, having a sliver of understanding of what happened.

Still, he’s blackmailed Natsume with this before. The Fujiwaras learning of Natsume’s abilities would only worry them endlessly, knowing he may have been taken by something they could do nothing to stop. He’s wily enough to consider doing this when Natsume is alive, although that threat had been more of a bluff than he let on. Still, to do so for a dead child would be needlessly cruel, even for him. Sometimes ignorance, or rather a guided sense of ignorance, is the most blissful option.

He pockets the idea, to contemplate later.

Strolling down the road he sees a picnic table. At the table, a girl draws furiously on a large sheet of paper. So engrossed in her task, she doesn’t seem to notice Matoba strolling up behind her. As he gets closer, he nearly starts.

He’s never seen those patterns before, the circle sprawling and growing in unfamiliar complexity on her paper before his very eyes. Yet it seems most certainly the work of an exorcist. It’s fascinating.

He leans over her shoulder—looms, might be the better world, but he’s hardly so gothic as to refer to himself that way.

“What have we here?”

The girl yelps, practically bounces a meter into the air, before turning to stare at him with wide, shocked eyes. From this vantage point he can see how young she really is, and it’s only years of training that has him attempting to memorize the patterns that decorate the paper in front of him, before the girl pulls either side of the paper up, hiding the designs like she would slam a book shut.

She stares at him a moment longer, then moves to collect her bag at her feet, shuffling clumsily as she tries to stand.

“What was that design?” he asks her. She stares at him with suspicion. Her eyes flit to his eye patch, and he smiles amiably at her. She still refuses to speak.

“I’m an exorcist, but I’ve never seen designs like that,” he offers. “Although I suspect you are likely aware.” Perhaps she is the daughter of a small, local family, out here trying to learn an age-old practice on her own. It reminds him of a younger Natori.

Her mouth opens, before clamping shut, and she sits back down, but doesn’t reveal the paper, keeping it clutched to her chest with a white-knuckle grip.

Interesting.

“My name is Matoba Seiji. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

Finally, she speaks. “I’m not really—I’m not with any exorcists.”

She speaks as if the concept is fairly foreign to her, as though she’s heard of the profession in passing but fails to hold the framework with which to properly refer to it.

He gestures to the paper. She shifts further away from him.

“It’s nothing really special,” she says. “I just…do them for fun.”

“It certainly didn’t look like fun,” he says. From what he has observed, her actions seem abnormally intense. Fevered, even.

She visibly hesitates. “You said you’re an exorcist?”

He nods. Strange, that she hasn’t heard of him, but perhaps she is simply too young.

“Do you know a Natori Shuuichi?” she says.

That is not a name Matoba expects to hear. How many children in this area has Natori befriended?

“I guess you could call us old friends, of sorts,” he says. “Business acquaintances, if nothing else.”

“Really?” her voice grows hopeful. “Then do you know Natsume? I’m not very much help, but I’ve been doing my best to look for him. Natori, too. He said he had some friends in the area looking for him.”

Ah, she thinks Matoba is one of Natori’s lackeys. It’s not a pleasant assumption to hear, but it’s gotten her to talk. He can use it. The rest of her words take longer to catch up with him, and he feels a sting of irritation at not picking up after it sooner.

The uniform, the age, the location, all of it points to her being one of Natsume’s classmates, and apparently a well-informed one.

“I’ve put my resources towards finding him, yes. It’s unfortunate, what occurred.”

She opens her mouth to say something else, but the flicker of movement from behind her catches his attention.

“Stand back.”

The youkai from his assignment stares at them through the bushes. It wails a mournful and frankly annoying tune in their direction, rustling leaves accompanying it, before Matoba brings up his bow to take a shot at it. He misses—curses internally, his aim has been shoddy lately—and takes aim again.

“Is there something there?”

Her voice startles the youkai and Matoba alike. It darts off through the trees, but Matoba has forgotten about it already. He’s watching the girl, who is squinting in the direction of his fallen arrow.

“You can’t see youkai?” he says. And yet she knows of them, and of Natsume and exorcists, and their practices.

“No, not usually,” she says. She purses her lips together, then pulls her hands from her chest. The paper unfurls a bit in her grip, but she refuses to fully reveal its contents.

Matoba connects the dots, and the conclusion he reaches is admittedly astonishing. The ability to show youkai to those who normally do not possess the sight ranges from strictly taboo to outright prohibited, if someone is to somehow manage to create the means to do so in the first place. To think that Natsume had even this ability at his discretion, if this girl is truly as loyal to him as she appears to be. Even posthumously, the boy amazes Matoba.

She seems to realize that _he_ has realized, so she speaks.

“My grandfather came up with it,” she says desperately. Matoba listens, enraptured. “They’re dangerous, and I know I shouldn’t really be using them, but they’re all I have.”

She goes on to explain what has led her to this point. How the curse of a youkai preyed on her, and how despite the fear from this incident, she’s been using every tool at her disposal to find her friend.

The loyalty feels unfamiliar. Plenty of people are loyal to the Matoba clan, although Matoba would be a fool to think that loyalty came out of love rather than fear or coercion.

And yet this teenager feels committed to Natsume and to all of their youkai friends despite her ordeal, and they to her, even after so terrible and exemplary an experience. The notion completely boggles Matoba.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Taki Tooru.”

He should do something about her. Take her illicit items away and destroy the more obvious, while assimilating the rest into the Matoba clan’s arsenals. Duty declares it so. But he’s far past normal duty at this point, and this is simply a final push.

_August 13 - ///_

Taki is an avid student.

He prods her more about her grandfather’s achievements, and while she remains tightlipped on the majority of that avenue of conversation, she does occasionally mention his work, whenever Matoba offers a drop of related knowledge first.

He finds himself taking easier solo cases to the befuddlement of the other clan members, so he can instead spend time watching her draw circles in the dirt, her face delighted at the sight of a youkai shimmering in the air before her.

To everyone she sees she asks about Natsume. While most are wary of getting close to the Matoba in her vicinity, a few do offer their answers, as lacking as they may be. Matoba feels more ardently that Natsume has passed onto the next life with every encounter.

She disapproves of his methods, more often than not, and it throws Matoba off to a greater degree than he is willing to admit. Due to the nature of his identity, he must occasionally exorcise youkai in front of her. He allows her to watch one time using one of her circles, only for her to plead that he call it off halfway through. He completes the exorcism regardless, and she doesn’t speak to him for a week afterwards. When he tries to guilt her by showing her the risk he faces every month fighting off the youkai that targets his eye, she takes another week to think it over while he stews. He understands then more than ever how she and Natsume got along in the first place.

Still, she picks up on the less deadly of his tricks, and before he knows it he’s showing her talents he learned growing up, spells to trap youkai and to call shiki forward and everything in between.

He introduces her to Nanase once, and the pair initially get along, for all of Taki’s caution. Later, when Matoba and Nanase are alone, the older woman admits to Taki’s strength, with the caveat that she would be stronger if only she could see.

He hasn’t ever lied to Nanase, he thinks, but he fails to tell her the truth here, about Taki’s taboo practices and the extent of her abilities. Again, it feels strange.

The masked shiki take a liking to her, despite his attempts to use them to scare her. She may not be able to see them without her circles, but they follow her around like dogs. It’s the most animated he’s ever seen the artificial youkai. With it she brings a brightness to the Matoba clan, one he suspects hasn’t been accessible to the clan members in decades, if not longer.

He takes her on officially as an apprentice, despite everything in the logical part of his brain saying the venture is worthless, and despite not actually vocalizing this change in status to anyone. He does take her to an exorcist’s gathering one time, despite his better judgement. She stares wide-eyed at those she can see, but he dresses her as a shiki and instructs her to remain silent, to avoid speaking with anyone unless she can help it.

They attract a lot of attention. He’s used to it, even if she seems shy. He hears whispers behind and around him, from humans and shiki alike.

“What’s this? Has the great Matoba realized he needs an heir?”

“It’s a shiki. Has he finally claimed one as his own?”

“He feels different. Distraught? Happy? It’s strange on his face.”

“Stop talking, he’s coming over.”

He ignores them all.

“Does it not bother you? The gossip?” Taki asks. He can tell she hates all of the eyes on her, far more used to going invisible than deliberately drawing attention to herself. Still, there’s a fire in her eyes. As much as she gives Matoba flak for his work, he can practically hear her dealing it out to the strangers around her en force.

One voice chimes in louder and clearer than the rest.

“Matoba.”

“Yorishima,” Matoba greets. His face remains placid, but he’s shocked. Only once in a blue moon does the older man attend these meetings, let alone approach Matoba for seemingly casual conversation.

“What are you doing here?” Matoba says.

“I normally have no intention to speak with exorcists,” Yorishima says distastefully. “But I’d like to keep up with recent events.”

Yorishima gives Taki, who is raiding a food table, an appraising look.

“Why did you bring this teenager here? It seems hardly prudent, after what happened to Natsume.”

Matoba most certainly didn’t tell Yorishima about that particular issue. It’s more likely that Natori let the older man know, but Yorishima has always been far too much of a mystery for Matoba to be certain of that fact.

“She’s a shiki,” Matoba says.

Yorishima’s face twists like he’s swallowed a lemon. “She’s a child. As are you, apparently.”

“Perhaps,” Matoba says, cracking a smile. He smothers it before it becomes so permanent that others could see it and consider it weakness, but it’s enough to garner an eye roll out of Yorishima.

“Be careful,” he says after Taki, directed at her with his typical brusqueness. “You may feel like you’re doing good, but there’s no help in self-sacrifice.”

He directs his gaze at Matoba. “Utilize your resources,” he says. With that he stalks off, leaving Taki and Matoba to ponder his cryptic words.

They don’t have long to think before another voice shatters what little peace they still have.

“Taki?”

“_Tanuma_?”

To Matoba’s left, another shiki that looks like a teenager—no, a teenager that looks like a shiki, he realizes—comes up to Taki and stares.

Natori follows. It’s the first time Matoba has seen him in person in months, despite the fact that they have shared increasingly frequent phone calls recently. The subject of their conversations has always centered around Natsume, about theories and potential suspects and areas he might have disappeared to, but eventually they derail into general discussions of exorcist politics, or even more infrequently, in shared memories.

Natori sounded better on the phone than he looks now, although Matoba suspects he’s simply known the other man long enough, and can tell. The actor has lost his touch, it seems.

Despite it all, he expects a now familiar glint of icy hostility in the man’s eyes, but he doesn’t receive it. Natori’s attention is centered on the other teenager, who upon pulling up his mask up has a familiar pair of glasses on his face. Natori looks positively scandalized at the interaction between the teenagers.

Matoba knows that Taki and Natori know each other. The teenager as well, Matoba recognizes as one of Natsume’s friends. Taki has mentioned him before, too The suddenness of the situation nearly throws him off.

Although he shouldn’t be surprised when Natsume’s fat pig youkai waddles up in between them. “You’re all ridiculous,” it says.

“Kitty!” Taki says, jumping onto Natsume’s youkai with a gusto. The little creature squeaks before its eyes droop, resigned to its fate.

The fact that she can so easily cuddle something he knows to be so monstrous is bewildering. But then again, half of what she does at any given time is bewildering.

Matoba ushers them into a small separate room in the estate, which gives Tanuma and Taki the privacy to explain to each other. It seems they’ve come to similar conclusions, with similar end goals and similar means.

Natori stands beside Matoba and they watch their charges at first silently, his arms crossed in front of him. Finally, he sends that telltale suspicious look Matoba’s way. Matoba returns with his best impression of a guileless expression.

They return their attention to the teenagers when Taki mentions how she had seen Tanuma with the glasses, suspecting him of meeting with Natori. Tanuma apologizes for keeping what he has been doing with Natori from her, and she apologizes for taking advantage of her grandfather’s work to spend time with her own exorcist behind his back.

“Looks like my protégé was on the ball,” Matoba says. “You should tell yours to keep up.”

Natori seems stunned, before he collects himself. “Shut up, Matoba.”

_October 3 - ///_

Madara thinks that he’s never spent so much time thinking about time.

He doesn’t dwell on it, because he’s not one to make things convoluted for the sake of being convoluted. But still. Time without that brat to contend with his been boring, not to mention extremely irritating, to be surrounded with so many sad people.

He doesn’t really think Natsume is dead. Or rather, he can’t imagine a time when Natsume wasn’t alive. He remembers feeling the same strange sensation after hearing Reiko had passed. So much of what made a Natsume—either of them—memorable was their presence, the sheer energy they exuded like sake out of an enchanted mountain spring. To think of their presence as extinguishable, like that of any average human, does not seem possible.

And yet here they are.

He goes to Natsume’s school, occasionally. Perhaps the sentimental part of himself that he buries deep within him expects to see the boy heading out of class with his friends. It doesn’t happen, obviously, but he still finds himself returning every so often.

Natsume’s human friends—the dumb ones, Kitamoto and Nishimura—occasionally spot Madara snoozing on the walls bordering school before he can wake up and ditch them. They always seem sad to see him, which Madara thinks is quite rude, but he allows them to pet him anyway.

It’s tiring being around them sometimes. Kitamoto mentions how similar Madara seems to someone named Hachiko one day, and Nishimura cries so hard because of it that he’s soon surrounded by a gaggle of other sympathetic students. Madara escapes in the chaos. He doesn’t understand the reference, and he doesn’t care to find out.

Sometimes the boys will go to the corner store just down the street and buy him pork buns or other treats, just like Natsume used to do. Madara eats them without complaint, because who is he to deny free food?

The time spent without Natsume at home, sleeping in his room, can be unbearably lonely. Natsume was never a talkative one, but he filled the silence well enough, and without him he’s forced to listen to Touko’s and Shigeru’s muffled conversation in the kitchen downstairs through the floorboards.

Most of his time, however, is spent searching. His prey has to be somewhere, after all, dead or alive. He flies over the trees every day in his full form, nose moving left and right in search of that familiar scent, and he finds nothing.

The Dog’s Circle, as annoying as they can be, have set up a large scale search effort for the boy, pulling in local youkai to their hunt. As disorganized as they may be, their morale manages to rally the youkai together enough for a sizable force.

It seems that even those who have had their names returned come back to help find some lowly human. They act loyal to Natsume, in a way that Madara has not seen quite so ardently in all of his many years.

Misuzu and Hinoe seem to focus on keeping them organized, more so than the Chukyuu are capable of doing. Misuzu takes to his human form now more than ever, bothering that human boy as well when he can.

On Madara’s side of things, it can actually be quite frustrating. It seems that every time Hinoe sees him, she flags him over and tugs at his ear, asking him if he’s seen the boy. Madara always says no, but by then the floodgates have opened, and he’s entertained with anecdotes from both the Natsumes, Takashi and Reiko, which only make Hinoe sniffle and splutter like a sick dog.

Grief is not foreign to youkai, who live for so long while all else fades to dust, but with Natsume’s disappearance is has definitely been expressed in a sudden and pinpointed way.

Even with all of this effort, their grief-driven methods yield nothing. The wilderness is large and expansive, and their forces laughably small in comparison. Even with the Dog’s Circle and an entourage they find nothing: no body, no spiritual presence, nothing. Madara suspects that if a youkai is at work, then it must be a powerful one.

Despite this, and what experience has taught him—Natsume is no stranger to being suddenly and brutally attacked by a youkai in search of the Book of Friends—Madara knows how fragile humans are, how easily they can be erased from their own narrative.

Madara knows that sometimes, the simplest answer can be the right one. Humans can be cruel, as can the environment, and Natsume is a simple human. Accidents do happen, and fates can fail.

It’s blunt, but it’s the truth.

When he’s fed up following the youkai around, he takes to following Tanuma, and then later that exorcist brat. Even more recently, they’ve begun spending time with that other slimy exorcist, the one with the eye patch, and the girl, Taki, who even now refuses to leave him alone whenever she feels the need to cuddle him.

He doesn’t trust the exorcists completely. To do so would be foolish. They’re exorcists, and he’s a powerful, magnificent youkai. Especially without Natsume to serve as a mediator, he’s flirting with disaster to remain so close to their circles, lest he want to spend eternal life as a shiki or better yet, brutally exorcised.

Even so, the children can be reckless, and Natsume would knock Madara upside the head if he abandoned them in Natsume’s absence. Taki shares some of her grandfather’s work with the exorcists, which Madara thinks is an absolutely terrible idea, but he says nothing and surprisingly, neither do the exorcists.

He seems to have underestimated them, in that regard. They’re sneakier than even he gave them credit for.

To the surprise of everyone involved, he finds himself one day within one of Matoba’s empty estates, alongside Natori, Taki, and Tanuma.

While Natori and Matoba go over more complex theories and evidence—Madara thinks he can spot some of the burnt remains of Hakozaki’s notes among their hoard—the children are doing their own research, poring over old books and ancient scrolls in search of something to guide them forward.

Madara curls up in his lucky cat form on a chair, watching them silently. He doesn’t expect them to find anything that could be used to locate Natsume buried among the pages of some dusty old tome, but he’s hardly been useful himself, so he entertains them.

As Madara watches, Taki takes out one of her grandfather’s journals, and then one of Matoba’s youkai encyclopedias. She points to an entry, beckoning Tanuma over. He spends a moment reading, then shakes his head. She seems dejected but jumps right back into it, tearing page over page in her dogged pursuit.

The hours pass, with Hiiragi and Natori’s other shiki flitting in periodically to offer their two cents. Matoba’s shiki come in less frequently, incapable of speech, but bearing food or drinks on trays carried by their slinky arms.

It seems almost domestic. Madara has never before seen such harmony between such disjointed members of Natsume’s life before.

Whereas Taki lives alone, Tanuma has already told his father that he is staying the night (if he hadn’t, Madara would have dragged the pair of them back home himself, by force). It still comes as a surprise when early in the night, Madara watches their heads, one after another, droop down to the table. Too many sleepless nights and overworked days will do that to a human.

Natori notices a few moments after Madara, followed by Matoba. Matoba takes a step forward as if to wake them, only for Natori to hold a hand out to him. As they both watch, Natori takes some spare blankets from a nearby closet and drapes them over the shoulders of the slumbering teenagers. Taki stirs but Tanuma appears dead to the world, but at least their feeble bodies won’t freeze now.

Natori makes some comment about waking them up properly in an hour, while the other mentions something about cleaning up and leaves the room.

For a moment, Natori and Madara are alone.

“If you have something to say, brat,” Madara starts. “Then say it.”

“There’s not a lot to say, is there?” Natori laughs, but it comes out more as a cough, and he turns to cover his mouth with his hand. The lizard scurries over the back of his hand and then straight back down beneath his sleeve.

Madara simply watches him, licking one paw. Natori swallows and continues.

“The Book of Friends…it’s in a safe place, still?”

“It’s safe. I’ve told you before. I watch over it, just like I promised I would.”

“You’re not watching it right now.”

“It’s _safe_.” Madara sniffs at the man. The gall, to doubt him like this.

“And you’ll tell me if it suddenly isn’t?”

“Obviously,” Madara says. Rather, he’d possibly tell Taki and Tanuma about it if it were urgent, both of whom would likely spill the beans to Natori and potentially Matoba if he’s in on the secret by then. Natori doesn’t need to know that, though.

The Book’s continued existence is quite the depressing topic. With no next of kin, the artifact is more dangerous than ever. The remaining names of the youkai Natsume never had time to free are forever trapped in the Book, bound to the pages until the end of time, or at the very least until someone decides to employ them or worse yet, to turn the pages to ash, destroying those unlucky few who still remain.

Madara doesn’t plan on losing it, so it’s not an important argument anyway, regardless of Natori’s insistence.

He leaves the humans to sleep the night off and continue their pointless research, and returns home.

He slips in through Natsume’s open window. Even now, it’s easy to slide the pane open and hop into the room. Even now, he somehow expects to be greeted amicably by his charge, or yelled at for staying out too late and getting too drunk.

Nowadays, all he gets is silence.

He spends a moment, standing in the center of the room. Natsume’s desk has grown dusty, which means that Madara has to spend another day cleaning the place, lest Touko get restless and do it herself.

He doesn’t dwell on that fact, because it is a problem for tomorrow and for now he wants to sleep.

Padding with heavy paws across the floor, he finds Touko's and Shigeru’s room. He wants immediately to curl up beside Touko and enter unconscious bliss, but he has a duty to do.

He wouldn’t call himself sentimental, but he’ll honor the promise he made. He’s still has things and people left worth guarding after all, in Natsume’s stead.

He reaches with his stubby cat paws beneath the Fujiwaras' futon, feeling with his little claws for a hard cover and the rough edges of paper. A soft hand settles on his back just as a claw nicks the edge of the Book’s cover, before it scoops him up and into someone’s side.

“Sleep, Nyankichi,” comes Touko’s drowsy voice. “It’s safe.”

Madara trusts her, so he curls into her embrace and closes his eyes, purring as hard as he can. 

_December 23_

It’s snowing.

Taki thinks the flakes are pretty, spiraling to the ground in curving paths. Even through glass they look beautiful. A sign that winter has finally come, and that it’s here to stay.

Isamu has promised to come visit, and Taki expects him back home the following day. She still searches for Natsume, nearly every day that she is able, but Taki feels no remorse in spending a snowy day off to relax with her brother.

The fact that she feels no remorse is paradoxically guilt inducing. It feels like she has accepted the current state of affairs as normal, even when she hasn’t.

More so, it feels like she’s pursuing a sense of closure. She hasn’t quite given up in finding her friend, because to do so would be a disservice to Natsume and his memory. But there is a sense of acceptance now. An acceptance, in the way that most people around her have given up on the missing boy and have written it off as some freak accident. An acceptance, in how most of her classmates, except for Kitamoto and Nishimura, both of whom know more than even she suspected, seem to follow in that line of thought.

An understanding in the new slant of her life, and the empty, forever unfilled hole that her friend once occupied.

It is filled with new things, none of which she would call necessarily better, but good in strange and fascinating ways. Matoba’s resources have made exploring and expanding upon her grandfather’s work easier than ever, with far less of the fear she had initially in pursuing it. And after learning of Tanuma’s and Natori’s growing relationship, they’ve worked hard at growing in other exorcist endeavors .

They still protest much of what their mentors do, just as their mentors fail to understand every nuance of their worldviews, but they’ve found a steady harmony. It’s a little community, full of these humans and of youkai and her friends, working for a goal and discovering so much more on the journey.

It’s a new normal, and a welcome one, but not a perfect one.

She also visits Touko whenever she can. It seems like the right thing to do, and the woman is so kind and welcoming that the time spent together is never a waste.

Touko seems unusually serious today, wringing her hands after she lets Taki into the house.

She sits Taki down at the kitchen table, presenting Taki with a fresh plate of taiyaki. Touko’s always been a good cook, but she’s taken up baking more and more recently, often sending Taki home with the spoils. She brings them to school the next day, afraid they would go to rot with only one person in an empty house to enjoy them.

They sit together in comfortable silence. Taki waits patiently for Touko to begin, even though she thinks she might know what this conversation will be about. Even months after his disappearance, Touko and Shigeru have refused to entertain the notion of a funeral service what with Natsume’s continued missing status. Taki has respected the decision before, and she’ll respect the decision she thinks Touko is about to make now.

“I think I may not have understood him, completely,” Touko says. Taki’s eyes widen, but Touko holds up a hand. Obediently, Taki stays quiet.

“Takashi is a kind boy. But I think the combination of what his family, his close family, did to him, and…” She trails off, swallows. “And whatever he could see. I think that combination often hurt him, in ways we couldn’t fully comprehend.”

Taki nods in understanding. Despite knowing more thoroughly of what Touko has figured out for herself, a part of Natsume that never trusted the light of day seems forever lost to them now.

“I wanted to give him patience. To show him he could come to us when he was ready, that we would be willing to listen and to understand. But it’s been so long now, that sometimes I think that we’ll never have the chance. It makes me think we should have said something sooner.”

Her lower lip trembles.

“Do you think that we could have done more?” she says. “He deserves so much.”

“I think it’s not fair, what happened,” Taki says, after a moment. She reaches a hand forward to rest on the back of Touko’s. The older woman grips back tightly. “I think Natsume deserves far more than he got. But I’m his friend, and I know that so much of the kindness he received came from you. You and Shigeru both.”

Touko dabs at her eyes with her apron. She tries to put on a smile, and the wrinkles on her face, deepened over the past few months, frame it.

After that Touko makes some more tea, and they move to look out over her garden. The snow has stopped, leaving a glittery blanket of silver over flattened brown and green.

Taki isn’t accustomed to seeing much wildlife out and about after a winter storm, so she starts when Touko suddenly points up and to her right, at a large black crow landing among the branches of a tree. The black sheen of its feathers glare out among the white of the snowflakes, falling to the ground beneath the creature as it settles onto its perch.

“The crow has a partner,” Touko says.

Touko describes the crows. The black one, and its white feathered companion. Taki doesn’t see the other one, but she nods anyway. After Touko is done explaining, she doesn’t expect Touko to see it either.

They’d still both like to pretend it’s there.

_June 2_

He wakes up on a patch of grass, surrounded by a ring of trees on all sides.

The sun beats down on him, warm in its dependable glow. Warmer than he expected it to be, but reliable.

Takashi sits up, feels the fabric of his pant legs. They’re slightly damp, but with the present heat they’ll be dry in no time.

He stands and moves in a circle. He’s in some unfamiliar stretch of woods. He’s accustomed to this, used to getting lost and finding his way back home, but the disorientation lingers this time around.

The day comes back to him in pieces.

He remembers stumbling upon a strange spirit without a face on his way back home from school. The spirit beckoned him over, speaking without a voice and promising to share something special in exchange for Takashi’s time.

No, not a spirit, but a god, with an elaborate mask and even more of an elaborate task.

Takashi remembers first waking up in the god’s realm, although the details now are fuzzy. He remembers hearing the god’s story, moving alongside the being as it toured Takashi across its land, sparkling and surreal to Takashi’s untrained eyes.

Takashi spoke to the god, about what he cannot remember, but the spirit must have brought him back after feeling satisfied, if Takashi is awake now.

He dusts himself off and carries himself toward what he thinks is a footpath. He’ll need to go home and make sure he hasn’t worried the Fujiwaras too much. Those people are far too kind to be concerned over Takashi carelessly stumbling into a god’s realm.

The walk down is uncharacteristically quiet. He doesn’t remember where Nyanko-sensei said he has gone for the day, but Takashi suspects he is also somewhere in the forest, drinking or otherwise occupied with whatever a youkai like him does to pass the time.

A pair of small youkai with leaves for their hands and heads appear in the path before him, only to stop and stare at Takashi. Takashi thinks he knows where this is going. Either a frightful explanation over his human status, or an awed declaration that they’ve stumbled across ‘the Great Natsume of the Book of Friends.’

Instead, the youkai freeze in place. Not of fear, but of disbelief, and then excitement.

“He’s been found!” one says.

“Finally, he’s found!” the other says, before it darts into the trees. The first gives Takashi a long, inquisitive look, before it too runs off.

Takashi doesn’t dwell too long on the brief interaction. Much of what the youkai say doesn’t make sense, not without the context they so sparingly supply.

It’s the late afternoon, or so he suspects, by the time he makes it down the hillside and back to a main street. By now he recognizes the way, pointing himself back to the Fujiwara residence.

Something about the front of the house looks different, but Takashi cannot pinpoint exactly what. He slides the door open silently and steps inside, setting his shoes aside.

He opens his mouth to announce that he’s home, only to spot Touko standing at the end of the hall. Her eyes are blown wide, a cup held in shaking hands in front of her.

Takashi does not like the expression she is making.

The cup in Touko’s hand plummets to the floor, shattering instantly. Before Takashi can so much as yelp and dive to pick up the shattered pieces, Touko has him in her arms, sobbing and yelling incoherently for Shigeru. The older man appears from the top of the staircase, and faster than Takashi has ever seen him he jolts to Touko’s side, using his own arms to envelop them. As one, they sink to the floor.

Takashi can do nothing but stiffen and stare. Has he been gone longer than he thought? He feels as though his own emotions are working overtime to keep up with the stifling ones all around him.

It takes some time to calm Touko and Shigeru down, and even longer for him to make sense of their words.

The date doesn’t make sense, and the season is wrong. The people in front of him don’t make sense, and the words they are telling him do not compute.

Nyanko-sensei bursts through the door behind where the three of them have crumpled to the floor in the hallway. He gives Takashi a long, empty stare, before his short legs lumber over. He gently places himself in Takashi’s lap and purrs, loudly until it reverberates all the way up to Takashi’s skull.

Nyanko-sensei’s reaction snaps him back into reality, and his world begins to reform back into its new shape.

Eventually they all shuffle further into the house. Touko asks him question after question, most of which Takashi does his best to answer while omitting obvious details. Touko doesn’t seem to care for the validity of his answers at the moment, too caught up in a steady and thrumming relief.

A noise from the front of the house calls his attention again. He turns his head to see the source, only to be met with more astonished faces.

In the doorway, Taki stands, staring at Takashi like he’s risen from the dead. From their perspective, he actually has.

Her hair is longer. It’s a minor detail amid the bigger and far more important picture, but a damning one all the same.

She rushes forward to embrace him. Tanuma is not far behind. Around their forms, clutching at him like koala bears, he sees Natori and to his greater surprise, Matoba. Were he not so occupied with his friends in his arms, he’d show more shock to see even the two of them overtaken with some sort of emotion. He’ll have to talk about it with them later, if they seem so comfortable around each other, around his friends and family, now.

Taki runs her mouth after that. They ask him about where he disappeared to, and he explains as succinctly and vaguely as possible that it involved some errant god, cognizant of the Fujiwaras behind him.

He feels himself growing pale. He’s lost so much time, has so much to catch up to, and has so much to explain to them. He doesn’t know where to begin.

Still, no one seems to care too much about the details right now. Rather, they focus on the miracle before them. While they catch up on lost time, taking in all that they have missed of Takashi for the past year, he soaks in the warmth. He realizes then, how time so inconsequential for him has gained meaning so momentous for the others.

“You’re never leaving this house alone again,” Nyanko-sensei says, after the tears have dried and all the words that anyone has strength to say have been said. He curls again into Takashi’s lap, jabbing into Takashi’s side with one clawed digit.

Behind him, Touko laughs, a tinkling, familiar noise. It takes Takashi another moment for the interaction to catch up to him and fully register, his head whipping around to regard her. His gobsmacked expression sends his friends into another round of laughter, and it fills the house and bleeds out steadily like chimney smoke.

He has more to catch up with than he thought. It’s dizzying. 


End file.
